Introduction
FACEMINER is a pretty simple incremental game about running a face mining company. You’re basically playing as someone who is harvesting as much data as possible, consequences for the rest of the world be damned. No, I’m not kidding; here’s the Steam blurb:
Build a biometric data harvesting empire from scratch in FACEMINER, the hardcore thriller clicker set in 1999. Classify data, upgrade mining infrastructure, and scale up your A.I. surveillance empire to obscene ends in this creepy narrative-driven incremental management sim with a dystopian twist.
FACEMINER contains AI-generated content. This is what the disclosure says: FACEMINER is a concept-driven game that directly engages with the ethics of AI. For thematic purposes, the game features faces which have been generated by a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) trained on the FFHQ dataset, a research dataset released by NVIDIA that is the backbone of many real-world facial recognition applications. Per NVIDIA, only images under permissive licenses were collected.
The ‘AI training’ in this game is fictional and has been simulated for entertainment purposes. The game can be interpreted as a critique of AI specifically relating to the ecological impact of mass data hoarding, surveillance concerns, and way it is used to compound corporate power.
Story
You play as a data harvester working for a company called FACEMINER. The premise is just that, and while it’s simple, I think that it works here. As the story continues, lore about the world is dropped into your inbox or found within the files on your 1999-themed desktop. Later in this review, I will praise the aesthetic of FACEMINER to the sun and back because it’s doing all of the heavy lifting here.
I won’t spoil the end, but the game can be completed in about 4 hours or less. Each of the difficulties changes the game only slightly. They’re not going to change the story of the game in any way.
Gameplay
FACEMINER is very simple; you point and click. Your goal is to mine as many faces as possible in a few different ways. The methods that you mine faces through don’t matter because, even as far as incremental games go, FACEMINER features little interaction.
It’s an incremental game, so that’s the kind of gameplay you get. For what you get, the game works fairly well. You have to manage all aspects of your computer to keep your operation running. But even that becomes…shallow.
I really like incremental games too, but for whatever reason there wasn’t enough here to keep me engaged. With that being said, I did beat the game for at least one run, but it was mindless. Everything becomes so easy to do that it feels like you don’t have to think anymore.
Final Thoughts
I really don’t have much to say about FACEMINER in the way of gameplay, but I need to talk about how much I love the aesthetics of the game. Everything from the PC to the sound effects, and even the way the in-game screen will shine or turn red when it gets too hot. It really does feel like playing on an actual computer, which is awesome.
The soundtrack is also fantastic. I really like the whole atmosphere of the game, but calling this game a horror game is being very generous. I agree with the game’s message, but the delivery is very surface-level and shallow.
Score
FACEMINER is getting a 70/100, which is a Silver Token.
- Surface-level story.
- Mechanics that get tired after only a few hours of gameplay.
- Amazing atmosphere, soundtrack, sound effects, and attention to detail when it came to creating a virtual computer.